Is a ‘Deadpool’ Sequel Already Underway?

Fox’s Deadpool film isn’t set to hit theaters until Friday, but it looks like the studio is already turning its attention to a sequel. As executive producer Simon Kinberg confirmed, plans for a follow-up flick have apparently already been set in motion.

The first footage from the upcoming Deadpool movie, starring Ryan Reynolds, caused a lot of excitement among Comic-Con audiences last year, with the rest of the world reacting just as positively upon the trailer’s official debut in August. It’s a lot of hype to live up to, but according to Kinberg, the movie will deliver on everything the trailer promised.

“I have seen a rough cut of Deadpool and it’s fantastic,” he told Collider. “We really committed and leaned into it being R-rated. It’s just darker and edgier and weirder in the best way—like Deadpool should be—than any other movie in the genre.”

In fact, Fox execs are feeling so sure about the film that Kinberg says they’ve already started looking ahead to the sequel. “We were talking about the sequel while we were making the movie, just because when you make a film like this that’s from a serialized source material, you hope that it’s the first of many, and we still hope that,” he explained.

While planning ahead might be par for the course with big comic films like this one, Kinberg says the studio also has high confidence in Deadpool and it’s box office potential. “We still have work to do on [Deadpool] because it obviously doesn’t come out for many months. But yeah, they’re feeling good about it, we’re all feeling really proud of it,” he said. “So hopefully before it comes out, we will be well into the process of figuring out a sequel.” [Update, 2/11/16: Per insider sources cited by The Hollywood Reporter, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the duo who wrote the original, are already writing the script for the ‘Deadpool’ sequel.]

So what exactly would the sequel entail? Planning has only just begun, but Kinberg, who also produces the X-Men franchise, suggests the follow-up installment could possibly involve the iconic comic character, Cable. For those who don’t know, Cable is the son of Cyclops who is raised in a distant future and is often paired with Deadpool.

“[Cable is] a character that I’ve always wanted to do in one form or another,” Kinberg told Collider. “We talked about Cable actually in Days of Future Past at one point. But yeah, we’re in such the early stages of sequel talk, it would be genuinely premature for me to say whether or not he was gonna be in it.”

While it might be early on in the planning process, it’s safe to say that the chances of getting more Deadpool films are pretty good. But a sequel isn’t the only big plan for the franchise’s future that Kinberg recently revealed. Aside from beginning to conceptualize a follow-up film, the producer suggested that Deadpool could eventually see a crossover with X-Men and the upcoming Gambit.

Since Days of Future Past reset the X-Men timeline, Kinberg says there’s room for the three characters to “cross-pollinate.” “So the Gambit movie, the Deadpool movie, will exist in a world that acknowledges whatever happened in Days of Future Past and moving forward,” he explained. “Doesn’t mean they’ll always interact with those characters, obviously, it’s not like every movie has all the characters, but they all have to exist within the same rules. There will be interplay between different characters in different movies.”

With Deadpool still a few months away from release, we obviously have a ways to go before we hear any more concrete details about plans for any sequels. Still, it’s clear that the studio has high hopes for the franchise, which can only be a good sign of what’s to come in the upcoming solo film.